Billionaire designer Tory Burch shares the best advice she ever got

Tory Burch broke onto the New York City fashion scene in 2004,
and became nationally recognized after
Oprah Winfrey christened her "the next big thing in fashion"
the following year.

Today, Burch is the billionaire
chairman, CEO, and lead designer of an award-winning fashion
label with 130 boutiques around the world and products in an
additional 3,000 stores. Forbes has called her one of the most powerful women
in the world.

The best advice she got when she was starting out came from her
friend Jane Rosenthal, the cofounder of the Tribeca Film
Festival, who helped her realize that leaders, especially women,
should not try to hide their ambition.

The article portrayed Burch as a Manhattan socialite who shied
away from coming across as arrogant: "While reserve prevents her
from saying so, Mrs. Burch, 37, a pillar of New York's young
social set, clearly has ambitious plans for her new brand."

The article concluded: "Is she ambitious? 'That's my new word to
be annoyed by,' she says with a delicate look in her eye that
asks you to go no further."

"The article is great," Rosenthal told Burch at the time, "but
you shied away from the word 'ambition,' and you should
never, ever shy away from that word again."

"And I think that's great advice for women," Burch explained to
Stanford. "I think women should be just as ambitious as men, and
be proud of it."

The lesson stuck with Burch. In 2009, she founded the Tory Burch Foundation,
dedicated to funding and mentoring women entrepreneurs across the
country, stoking within them the ambition that has made her so
successful.